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As well as being the year of the Gamejam and Kickstarter, 2012 is the year that turn-based strategy finally uses up all the action points its been conserving since the ’90s and trundles back into view. There it is now, jogging up the road, ready to show us alien-killing, petrol stations exploding and maybe the occasional viking with a banner. Oh, but now it’s stopped in the middle of the road. It’ll be there for a few months, squatting, but then the fun will begin. Void Rim should be joining the turn-based battle soon as well. From a quartet including the co-creator of PoxNora, it’s a squad-sized emulation of tabletop gaming set in an original sci-fi world. Behold, a trailer.

My finely honed tactical instincts tell me this will be about the competitive clobbering, being online and free to play with currency to be won/bought and spent in game. There’s a strong emphasis on preparation, with three factions to choose from, and both powers and loadouts to select for individual units. The factions don’t sound like they differ in hairstyle alone either, with one bragging about teleportation abilities, another with the ability to rebuild fallen allies and the third “become more and more powerful over the course of a game”.

Beta signups are open, although there’s no specific date for the beginning of play. I’ll have a look as soon as possible and see if there’s a fuss to be made.

Who said anything about full-priced? From that trailer I wouldn’t spend $50 on it but if it was reasonable and had enough content why not? A game should stand on it’s own merit rather then just ‘trial’ version and call it free2play.

To get the all the content will cost probably more than double what a full-priced retail game would cost. Games like this just exploit peoples laziness and call it “Time vs Money”, it’s plain evil and marketing teams make you believe it’s normal and okay. I would know I’m a PC market researcher.

As much as i hate exploitative funbux-fueled games (and boy, do i hate them), what Dominic says about not being able to find players is true. Shattered Horizon and Plain Sight are good examples of why an up-front price for indie multiplayer games is a bad idea: few people actually spend that up-front price, and thus the servers are perpetually empty.

However, i am not sure if this thing – game client being distributed for free with money made on microtransactions – actually helps bring in more players. I simply don’t have the data.

Shattered Horizon along with poor marketing had the issue of being very hard to run. (But boy was that game ever great) It had *enough* players to make it worth playing. Another game I can think of is Red Orchestra 2 which is probably my most favourite PC multiplayer game of all time (aside from CS:GO right now), it suffered from poor marketing as well as being hard to run + a lot of bugs at release. The quality of those games would of suffered tremendously if they were free2play, the problem is marketing and QA.

I wanted to disagree at first, and cite some other game from my Steam library as an example, but the first i thought of – Nuclear Dawn – is actually rather popular. So perhaps it is a marketing problem (even if the game being nominally free can still bring in a few extra players).

Nuclear Dawn has been on sale, a daily deal, or even given away nearly-free as part of an indie bundle almost all through its life. The fact that it’s just about staying afloat after all that is proof that regular retail releases are pretty much fucked these days.

Hey, the beta sign-up for Void Rim is doing a Salem-a-like thing whereby if you get one additional person to sign up for beta, your own place is guaranteed. Much obliged if anyone becomes that one person by using this link. If you do, please do reply to say so so that my link doesn’t get used more than it needs to!

I want better efforts for TBS. Tell people to go play Silent Storm and come back when they understand why – looking past the broken leveling and Panzerklein grudge so many people seem to have – it is so awesome in what it does.